What the talk is really about.

Five years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, I took an online Yoga Teacher Training. Our final exam question asked, “what would you do with unlimited resources?”

My first answer: “I would build a community where people with mental health challenges could live in community with their loved ones and thrive.”

I recently found my rough drafts scribbled on the back of a car service receipt. My final draft included this, “and I would live there, too.”

Today, I would add only one thing: a herd of horses.

Sounds like a child daydreaming in class. I get it. Yet, it’s so much more real than that.

On March 5, 2023, Proposition One barely passed in California with much controversy. The problem: homelessness, the solution: forced treatment for the many “Unhoused” who are ill.  “From Tents to Treatment” supporters coined and touted.

Two months later, as fate would have it, I embarked on an odyssey through our mental healthcare system, supporting and advocating for someone I cared about. Locked facilities, Emergency rooms, residential programs, med-psyche units — we saw the inside of them all. Let’s just say what I saw behind locked doors, for a while, kept me up at night.

The struggle for humane, effective treatment is still very real, even all of these decades after Jack Nicholson’s iconic role in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. I made a decision then and there to dedicate the rest of my life to doing something about it.

We have made so much progress — drugs, therapies, treatment is so much more effective than it used to be. So why are people committing suicide and living on the streets in such greater numbers — so much so, it’s considered an epidemic?

As we journeyed through the system, it became painfully clear that the issues are systemic and very obvious to anyone who knows what to look for.

Here’s the good news: the solutions are just as obvious. I began to envision them. More than 100 times I thought, “things could be so easily improved here. I’m circling back to this.”

As I continue to do the hard work to launch this business and advocate for change, I find it daunting to consider what is at stake and how to best make a difference. It brings me back to my YTT final exam.

Community is our answer. It is hard work to maintain balance while working and raising a family. Life happens to everyone and yet all the more disruptive when vulnerabilities exist. With a community of support and the resources needed made much more accessible, life’s storms can be weathered more easily.  People can begin to consistently improve and avoid the constant setbacks and relapses.  These are what take a toll on individuals already suffering, as well as their loved ones and society as a whole.

My Stable Life’s ultimate mission is to create residential communities that include anyone willing to join the movement. Within are those who are trained and demonstrating a stable life. They can support one another and also mentor those recovering. This is not something new, and it is proven to work. Let’s institutionalize it. Make it something as easy to propagate as an IKEA or Costco.

Sounds impossible, I get it. For inspiration, read Alcoholics Anonymous (a.k.a. The Big Book). They did it so well, today they are considered the experts.

Proposition One proposed new housing and facilities. I am proposing a new way of looking at recovery from start to finish. From crisis to complete reintegration back to life and family. This is not encouraged anywhere I have seen.

More often if someone isn’t in crisis, they don’t qualify for care. It is too easy to slip through the cracks and wind up on the streets. If they do qualify for care, they are kept in beds long past what is healthy or they come back again and again.

In a system like ours, sick people are good for business.

My Stable Life aims to build a network of communities as unified as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in their method and success rate. Helping people not only recover their sanity but also their families, livelihoods and attain the potential all humans have, no matter what the obstacles.

Dr. William D. Silkworth, the now famous champion of AA, in 1939 wrote of the more difficult of his patients to heal: “there is the manic-depressive type, who is, perhaps, the least understood by his friends, and about whom a whole chapter could be written.”

It’s 2025. Let’s finally write that chapter. I want to turn my stable life into countless stable lives and change the way society as well as families imagine recovery. 

“Are these extravagant promises?  We think not...”